


To Taste a Pure Heart

by valis2



Category: Miami Vice
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-07
Updated: 2010-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 22:25:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valis2/pseuds/valis2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is one day Martin Castillo remembers above all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Taste a Pure Heart

There are days which one does not forget.

The first kiss.

Leaving home.

The death of a parent.

There is one day Martin Castillo remembers above all.

A Thai restaurant downtown. Soup, hot, coconut and lime. The taste of an old life. He pays the bill in the back.

Cheap gifts crowd a rack next to the register. Tacky Asian things for tourists.

A rack of ties. Dragons in red and orange, koi, Japanese calligraphy. He reaches out and fingers one lone, nondescript black skinny tie.

"For you, four ninety five," says the cashier.

He nods and takes the tie in hand. It shifts in his hand, and for a strange second, he thinks it is alive.

* * *

That night, he gets in bed. Dreams of things which cannot harm him. Blunted knives. Broken harpstrings.

He wakes to find a snake in his hand. He does not stop to consider his actions; he throws it across the room while he takes his gun in his other hand.

The tie falls to the floor. He pokes it with his gun.

There is a chance, however slim, that he might have taken the tie into his hand while asleep. It is not outside the bounds of reason.

He gets back in bed, but finds he cannot sleep. In the dark, his measured breathing carefully rising and falling, he feels the touch of a synthetic blend on his wrist, hesitant, and he wonders if he has truly lost his mind.

He has touched madness before, but this feels nothing like it. The tie winds itself around his wrist, one loop, two loops, slowly settling into his palm with the delicate touch of a lover.

* * *

It takes three days before he actually puts it on.

The first day, it is waiting for him when he gets home. It is on the kitchen counter, a cup of hot tea beside it.

The second day, he finds it in his car, curled up under the seat.

The third day, he finds it in the pocket of his pants.

On the fourth day he puts it on. It feels like a regular tie. It is not uncomfortable or comfortable. It is a tie. He adjusts it. He waits for something to happen. Pearls showering from the sky. Elephants running loose in the streets.

Nothing. He gets in his car and goes to work.

Again and again he is thwarted by corruption and greed. He cannot seem to move forward.

He does not wear the tie every day, but it is never far from him.

Months pass. One day he is speaking to his supervisor. There is an opening at OCB. He doubts that it is a good move for him.

There is a whisper in his ear. He discards it. But there it is again, persistent, sibilant, and for a moment he considers it again. A chance to lead. To move forward. He agrees to take the job.

The OCB is as expected. There is corruption in places; there is greed. He begins to doubt that this is the course, but there is another whisper to calm him.

He meets the Vice team. They are flawed but he senses that there is no corruption here. He is strong and does not waver; he crushes the serpent of rebellion beneath his heel. They toe his line. He does not care if they resent it.

The tie whispers to him more often. It hisses at those whose hearts are black.

He realizes that he trusts its voice. Her voice.

The tie leads him to a corrupt ring of slavers. A drug trafficking organization considered to be untouchable. She tells him when the interrogated lie; she grows warm with anger when the guilty are freed. She murmurs of justice and strength and the sweet taste of the pure soul.

At night she winds around his left arm.

She whispers of his team. Of Switek, with the broken wing, slowly spiraling to earth. Of Tubbs, his inner fire that never dims.

He pays a visit to an Asian antiquities dealer named Edward Hillerby. He claims to have information about recent thefts; he has long been consulted by the authorities.

They sit at a low table and a woman pours tea for them. Martin watches as Hillerby explains that the stolen art was priceless and must be returned. He knows the man who has stolen these pieces.

Martin nods and picks up the teacup.

_It is poisoned._

The whisper is so loud that Martin is certain that Hillerby has heard it, but there is no reaction.

_Pretend to drink, but pour your tea upon me._

Martin hesitates. The tea smells like tea, green, the steam curling from the surface, but he pours a spare mouthful onto the tie, not into his mouth, using his hand to conceal the gesture. Does Hillerby look relieved? He narrows his eyes.

That night the tie does not come to his hand. It stays on the bed where he has dropped it. He touches it. It does not react.

He dreams of a dark mist blotting out the sun.

The next morning he takes the tie to the sink. Wrings her out, and there it is, three drops of poison, ashy and smelling of almonds. He touches her, and there is a twitch, and then she winds around his finger, and he can breathe again.

She stays home for three days. He feels strange wearing a different tie. Tense and wary.

His wife returns, a crane flying back upon the wind, carried to him by unknown forces. There is the pull, the dream of love he had lost, and there is a wish for a new dream. The tie is quiet.

His wife leaves with her husband. He drinks himself to sleep and wills himself to forget her. He refuses to dream.

The days thread into each other. His eyes feel like hot coals. Pain is anchoring his heart to earth, the barb tight against his breastbone. He works. As he should. As he will.

At night he locks the tie in a drawer.

On the ninth day he hesitates. He sets her on the bed, in her accustomed place, while he takes care of the needs of the living. Sliding under the cool sheets, he feels her touch, hesitant and sleek. She curls up on his shoulder.

At work he takes apart another drug ring, wrings it dry, separates the pieces. There is satisfaction, a grim kind of pleasure from having stemmed a tiny bit of the flood. He stops for a slice of cake at the panedería and remembers the taste of sweet in his mouth. The tie flutters a little.

That night, the tie slithers to his pillow.

_I can be her, if that is what you wish._

He turns to look at her, astonished.

_Is that what you desire? Is she what you desire?_

The tie shimmers. A white mist fills the air, and there she is, his wife, beautiful, warm, her living skin glowing.

He touches her body in wonder. Her breath is like perfume. He cups her face in his hands.

He looks into her eyes. Brown irises, like his wife.

Her pupils are matte black. Dry. Rasping against her eyelids.

He cries out and pushes her away.

"I am her, in every other way," insists the tie. His wife. The tie in his wife's body.

He shudders with fear. Worse, with desire.

"You are like a silver arrow, shot across the night sky," says the tie. "You are the purest soul I have ever seen. I love you."

"You are not her," he says. "You are not real."

"I can be real," she says, cotton teardrops falling from her eyes. "While I am a tie, you must knot me to something sturdy and cut me in half."

He recoils from her.

"You must! And then I will be her. I will stay with you always and never leave you. I will cry real tears and you will not know the difference."

"I will know the difference," he says. Then he moves closer. "What are you?"

"I am a fox," she says. "I was a fox. I loved a young and stupid boy. I gave my magic away to become his woman. But he loved another, and I was trapped in a body I did not own. I wandered over the cold earth for many days and many nights until Sri Thanonchai took pity on me and gave me another form."

"A tie."

"Martin," she pleads, his name on her tongue like lead. He shivers.

"No." He turns from her. There is a soft fluttering on the floor, and then the tie lies there, still.

The next day and the next, he wears a different tie. She does not move. He is careful not to step on her.

At work they set up a new prostitution sting. He surveys the women, walking on the street, gold earrings shining. There is a dark shadow within him, raw and hurting. He remembers her eyes. Her words. He sees a woman with coral lipstick and a silver necklace. She leans into a car, her grin easy but her eyes tired. He thinks of things he has done, of another country and promises made, and things that have been shattered and cannot be undone.

Night is heavy in the air when she comes to him again, her breath on his neck. Her hand touches his chest. "To make me real—"

"I will not."

The hand wavers, warm and then cool and silken and then warm again.

"I will not make you real; you are real already. I will not tie you and cut you in half."

"You cannot love me like this," she says brokenly.

"I cannot love you if you are her."

In the dim light he can see her face, a strange, bestial expression flitting across it. "I am but a poor shadow."

"To become another would make you her shadow," he says, taking her hands in his own. "You are real as you are. You do not need anything you do not have."

She is still as a stone.

He kisses her hand gently. "You do not need me."

She makes a strange gasping noise. "But that is...wrong."

He kisses her other hand.

She trembles. "If I do not change, you will find another, one wearing silk and beads of coral."

"I am not him." He strokes her face. "I am not him, and I will not leave, not for silk, not for beads of coral. I want you as you are and as you will be. I will stay with you to the end of things."

* * *

Martin Castillo politely declines offers of drinks after work. He does not attend fundraisers or charity balls. No one is invited to his house.

It is a joke in the office. He wears the same tie nearly every day. Switek tells a story sometimes, deep in his cups, about how he saw the tie stroke the back of his hand, but everyone always laughs. Except Switek.

At night Martin Castillo goes home and leaves the world behind. There is a woman waiting for him, even though she is never seen outside of those walls. Sometimes there is laughter but often there is only silence, a single candle's light seen flickering on the window.

The neighbor swears he has seen a tailless white fox in his garden, staring at the moon.


End file.
